Deborah's Developer MindScape

For the first time in Visual Studio history, you can open a Visual Studio 2010 project with Visual Studio 2012, save it, and open it again in Visual Studio 2010. They are backwards compatible!

If you want to use the new features of the Visual Studio 2012 editor on your current solution before the other members of your team, you can. You can open it and edit it in VS 2012 and they can open it and edit it in VS 2010.

I started using VS 2012 back in February 2012, even through the rest of my team were using VS 2010.  I was able to check in/out from TFS without impacting the other members of the team using VS 2010.

The only issues I ran into were:

• The Visual Studio 2010 Database project is not compatible with VS 2012. But VS 2012 lets you decide to NOT upgrade it. It then looks like the screen shot below.

• Office 2007 projects are not compatible with VS 2012. They won’t open and appear similar to the database projects.

I often have VS 2010 and VS 2012 open at the same time, editing in one and in the other. I can edit my Database project scripts and our Office 2007 project in VS 2010 and then edit the rest of my projects in VS 2012. (Similar to the experience with editing in Visual Studio and Expression Blend at the same time.)

Enjoy!